Browse Case Studies

Zapstream was a social live streaming platform founded in Q1 2015 that grew to 100k users by leveraging influencer marketing, particularly through a network of 30 smaller Vine and Instagram influencers. The startup raised $1M from angels but failed to secure additional funding due to an overly ambitious Series A valuation, and ultimately shut down after spending the entire $1M+ without generating any revenue due to intense competition from Meerkat, Periscope (Twitter), and Facebook Live.

Mark D. Jacobsen founded the Syria Airlift Project, a nonprofit moonshot effort to deliver humanitarian aid using drone swarms to break starvation sieges in Syria. Despite achieving significant technical milestones—including reliable autonomous 100km round-trip drone flights and professional demonstrations—the project ultimately failed in December 2015 due to lack of a viable business model, reliance on volunteer labor, and inability to navigate the complex political and logistical challenges of the Syrian conflict.

QuickHaggle was a skill-exchange marketplace built on a barter system model where users could trade services without payment. Despite positive reception and $500+ in Facebook Ads, the platform failed after a year with zero completed trades due to trust issues between parties and high customer acquisition costs.

Playdate was an on-demand social networking app that matched users to meet based on shared activities, growing to 5,000 monthly active users and a 7-person team over 2 years. The startup burned through $30-40k by trying to monetize through venue coupons post-MVP, but failed due to poor user retention from grassroots cannabis giveaways, inability to solve the chicken-and-egg problem for geographically dense matching, and slow organic growth. Logan shut down the company on February 22, 2019, after realizing Playdate had become a zombie company with no viable path to growth or investor interest.

Phez was a Reddit clone that rewarded content creators with Bitcoin micropayments, built by Shanti, a 38-year-old Ruby on Rails developer, in summer 2015 as a side project emphasizing free speech. The project failed due to a flawed business model—lack of marketing, poor user engagement motivated only by minimal Bitcoin rewards, and spam/gaming attempts made it unsustainable. Shanti shut down the site after several months, losing approximately $29,014 in opportunity cost when Bitcoin's value surged years later.

ABBY was a documentation and evaluation service for A/B tests built by Andy Goldschmidt after seeing the need for better test documentation at Jimdo. Despite getting 100 sign-ups from a Product Hunt launch that brought 20k visitors, the product failed because users didn't understand its value and it required too much user education in a competitive market dominated by Google Analytics and Optimizely.